CUET UG Exam Pattern: 37 Papers, 50 Questions, 60 Minutes — and the Fee

The CUET (UG) that most coaching pages describe — sections IA, IB, II and III, 40 of 50 questions, 45-minute papers — is the exam as it ran up to 2024. From 2025 NTA cut the menu from 63 papers to 37, made every question compulsory, gave every paper 60 minutes, lowered the cap from six papers to five and moved the whole exam onto computers. 2026 ran on exactly the same pattern. This guide sets out what the paper is now, what it replaced, and what it costs.

NTA bulletins 2025 and 2026; 2024 FAQ.

What went in 2025: 26 papers (our count, 63 − 37), mostly the 20 extra languages and a handful of niche domain papers such as Fashion Studies, Tourism and Entrepreneurship. What stayed: the 13 main Indian-language papers, 23 domain papers and the General Aptitude Test. The single Mathematics paper covers both Mathematics and Applied Mathematics — a common Section A1 and then Section B1 (Mathematics) or B2 (Applied Mathematics); how many questions come from each section is not stated in the 2026 syllabus PDF.

For the General Aptitude Test, go by the syllabus PDF, not the bulletin summary: the PDF includes general science and environment literacy. For domain papers the practical rule is simple — the Class XII NCERT book is the syllabus.

Fifty compulsory questions in 60 minutes is an average of 72 seconds a question (our arithmetic). With +5 for a correct answer and −1 for a wrong one, even a blind guess among four options gains +0.5 marks on average (our arithmetic), and every option you can eliminate improves that. Leaving a question blank only makes sense if you want to avoid the risk of a lower score, not to maximise your expected score. The practical difference from 2024 is that there is no longer a choice of which 40 questions to answer: every question is in play, so weak topics cannot be skipped wholesale.

Papers are offered in 13 mediums: English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The question paper is bilingual — English plus the medium you chose — and where the two differ, the English version prevails. The medium cannot be changed after the application. In 2026, 13,22,441 candidates registered in English and 2,18,058 in Hindi; every other medium had fewer than 12,000.

The fee structure has not changed since 2024; only the cap on papers has. In 2024 a sixth paper was allowed, which at general rates would have cost ₹2,200 in total (our arithmetic); since 2025 the most anyone can pay in India is ₹1,800. Because the first three papers cost the same as one, a candidate who genuinely needs only three should still consider whether a fourth or fifth widens their options enough to justify ₹400 each — at DU, a fifth paper that completes no extra combination adds nothing.